To Infinity and beyond?

Sad to see but the toys-to-life market seems to have cost Disney too much for their personal plans. $147 million to be exact; and with that have decided to cancel their Infinity series.

Disney’s game publishing arm, which appears to be defunct at this point, is part of the Consumer Products & Interactive Media division. That group saw a dip of 2% year-over-year for the quarter, but is up 4% at the half-year mark.

With this news they released a statement in which they said:

“After a thorough evaluation, we have modified our approach to console gaming and will transition exclusively to a licensing model,” says Disney consumer products and interactive media chairman Jimmy Pitaro. “This shift in strategy means we will cease production of Disney Infinity, where the lack of growth in the toys-to-life market, coupled with high development costs, has created a challenging business model. This means that we will be shutting down Avalanche, our internal studio that developed the game. This was a difficult decision that we did not take lightly given the quality of Disney Infinity and its many passionate fans.”

It is a shame that the Infinity series reached this point, thoughts go out to the employees affected by this situation with the CEO Bob Iger adding “..I give the developer a lot of credit for the product that they made. It was extremely well-received. But we knew going in that there would be a lot of risk with this product and the fact that we did so well initially gave us the confidence to continue with it. The truth of the matter is that the risks that we saw at the beginning when we started this caught up with us.”

Sad news but we hope the people affected move on to better opportunities.